A wandering granddaughter job: My Bouchercon Hammett panel

Here's a post from December 2013 that is more relevant today than ever. I'll be discussing Dashiell Hammett with Julie M. Rivett and Richard Layman at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C., next month in a session called "Inside the Mind and Work of Dashiell Hammett."  The Bouchercon schedule calls it a special event, and I agree. Hammett was the best ever, and Julie and Rick know more about him than just about anyone else. See you there; the fun starts at 8:30 a.m., Saturday, Oct. 10.

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Julie M. Rivett, co-editor of The Hunter and Other Stories, the new volume of previously uncollected and unpublished work by Dashiell Hammett, drove up from Orange County to chat with Detectives Beyond Borders about the book, Hammett, the movie interpretations of his work, his critical reception at home and abroad, and other subjects—including some of her favorites among current crime writers.

Rivett is not just a Hammett scholar and researcher, she's also the daughter of Hammett's daughter Jo (she met her grandfather once, when she was 3 years old) and, she says, "What I want to come from this is that people will read [Hammett's work] as literature. I want to make him a rounder character."  Your humble blogkeeper says the book, co-edited with the noted Hammett biographer and scholar Richard Layman, will do just that, especially in the form of "The Secret Emperor."

Rivett says the combination of her personal contacts and Layman's professional ones strengthens their partnership. (They also worked together on Return of the Thin Man, which brought together two previously unpublished stories about Nick  and Nora Charles.) And, asked about the portrayals of Hammett as a communist, a drunk, or a bad family man, Rivett rebuts some of the stories, concedes others, and says: "It's always a difficult thing for me when people co-opt my actual grandfather."

Her list of favorite contemporary crime writers includes Declan Hughes, Dennis Lehane, Michael Koryta, and George Pelecanos, and if I were a crime writer favored by a descendant and scholar of the greatest of all crime writers, my sinews would come unstrung and my tongue would cleave to the roof of my mouth for a few minutes before I was able to resume writing.

Coming soon: Rivett on Hammett's reception in France and Italy, and the possibility of more Hammett material to come.

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Rivett and I met for tea and a wine chaser at the Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, close to stars on the Walk of Fame that honor several figures prominently connected with Hammett's life, career, and interests. Mary Astor's, Myrna Loy's, and Fatty Arbuckle's stars are within a block and a half of the restaurant, and later I found Peter Lorre's and also the one that honors some guy named Bogart. Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet were perfect for their roles in John Huston's celebrated film version of The Maltese Falcon, Rivett said, and Bogart, she added, while not physically perfect for the role, did marvelous things with the character.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Happy birthday, Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler turns 124 127 years old today, so I thought I'd bring back some old posts about his influence on crime writers beyond his own American (and English) borders.

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Four years ago the Los Angeles Times asked writers what they would give Chandler as a birthday gift, but I'd like to discuss taking rather than giving, namely what other writers have taken from Philip Marlowe's great creator.
Two years ago, in a post called "Chandler in South Africa," I noted Roger Smith's graceful extended tribute to Chandler in his novel Mixed Blood.

Last year I discovered Claudio Nizzi, Massimo Bonfatti, and their loving, amused, and amusing tribute to Chandler (and just about every other crime, movie, and pop-culture trend) in their Leo Pulp comics.

Matt Rees, Welsh-born and Jerusalem-based author of mysteries set in the Palestinian territories, told Detectives Beyond Borders that: "My primary interests in specifically detective writers are Chandler and Hammett." Moreover, he said the social chaos of the territories reminded him of the worlds those two authors portrayed so well: "In the lawlessness and the corruption of the police force – which is often involved with the gangs – I see many parallels with the San Francisco and Los Angeles of Hammett and Chandler."

In Ireland, Declan Hughes invoked Chandler in discussing his own country's Celtic Tiger economic explosion and concurrent boom in crime and crime fiction: "The hardboiled novel always depended on boomtowns where money was to be made and corners to be cut: twenties San Francisco for Hammett, forties LA for Chandler.”

Also in Ireland, your humble blogkeeper noted the debt to Chandleresque plotting and wisecracking in Declan Burke's first novel, Eightball Boogie. Colin Watson's delightfully opinionated social history of English crime writing, Snobbery With Violence, cites Chandler, who "never produced a dull line," for his observations about crime writing and English writers.

An afterword to Juan de Recacoechea's Bolivian crime novel American Visa noted the author's references to Chandler, Hammett, Chester Himes, and movies based on their work. I've also detected more than superficial signs of Chandler's influence in novels by Australia's Peter Corris and noted the traces of Chandler some have found in the work of Algeria's Yasmina Khadra. Finally, Chandler is one of many crime writers upon whom Australia's Garry Disher muses in his wildly self-referential and wildly funny story "My Brother Jack."

***

And now it's your turn. What other crime writers from outside the United States have felt Chandler's influence? How has the influence shown itself?

***

Late-breaking Chandler tribute: I've just read the following in William Campbell Gault's Murder in the Raw (also published as Ring Around Rosa):

"Well, what had I brought to this trade? Three years in the O.S.S. and my memories of a cop father. Along with a nodding acquaintanceship with maybe fifty lads in the Department. That didn’t make me any Philip Marlowe."

 © Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2012

A look at Declan Hughes' second novel

I've gone back to read The Color of Blood, second of Declan Hughes' novels about Dublin investigator Ed Loy, after having read the first, third, fourth and fifth in the series.

I like to think that this book offers early examples of a tendency Hughes exploited more fully later : that of dealing with Raymond Chandler's themes, only more explicitly than Chandler ever did. This applies to sex, pornography, drugs, and family secrets, but also to issues of class, especially the class divide between investigator and clients. This almost always works, though in one instance the explicitness leads to the grave sin of telling rather than showing. (I could be wrong about the path from Chandler to Hughes, though, since I'm unfamiliar with one of the stops Hughes made along the way: Ross Macdonald.)

In the meantime, some lines from the book's first quarter or so, all but one of them good:

"Tommy being sober wasn't easy for me either, since he'd asked me to act informally as his sponsor. I explained that, since I had no intention of stopping drinking, this mightn't be the wisest idea."

"I'm not sure if there are ideal conditions to watch porn, but sober before midday doesn't even come close."

"I looked at Tommy, who was lying about at least some of it, of course, but who had worked himself into believing that he had told the whole truth and nothing but."

"Mr. Loy, mathematics scholars are not exactly coming down with offers of twosomes, let alone, ah, exponentials thereof."

"His Trinity manner had become grander, his voice a fluted drawl. I could feel the class boundary rising to divide us."

Hughes also quotes almost directly at least one line from The Big Sleep and has some self-referential fun doing so:

"`I make many mistakes,'" he said in an arch, ironic tone, as if he was quoting a line from a movie."

(Read my discussions of Hughes' novels City of Lost Girls,  All the Dead Voices,  The Price of Blood, and The Wrong Kind of Blood)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A hundred shades of emerald: Down These Green Streets

Down These Green Streets, newly published by Liberties Press under the editorship of Detectives Beyond Borders friend Declan Burke, bears an ambitious, ambiguous subtitle: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century.

Is this a book of Irish crime writing, or is it about Irish crime writing?  It's both, plus memoir, interview,  criticism, literary and film history, and a useful reading list, and that's just on my first dip into the book. Oh, and the collection does not confine itself to the 20th century, either. Early highlights:

• Ruth Dudley Edwards' evocation of Liam O'Flaherty. You'll want to read O'Flaherty if you haven't already.
• Declan Hughes on Irish identity and America's place in it.
• Alan Glynn on the Irish literary crime novel. (That's right, "literary crime novel." Glynn is the only person I know of who can use that phrase without making me wish I were somewhere else.) He'll make you want to read The Third Policeman, The Book of Evidence, and The Butcher Boy if you haven't already.
• Arlene Hunt on coming to terms with a violent world.

Stuart Neville offers a tear-jerking punch in the gut of a  story called "The Craftsman," and Ken Bruen has an emotional Jack Taylor piece I can't discuss objectively because I knew the main character.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon wrap-up: Connolly and Hughes's 10 crime novels to read before you die

More than ten, actually, because Declan Hughes and John Connolly, the two participants in the #Bcon2010 "Ten Crime Novels You Must Read Before You Die" session, sometimes disagreed which book by their top ten authors was best.

Each also gave an appendix of more novels at session's end, which gave Friday's lunchtime session-goers even more to think about.

1) Heading the list, appropriately so for a convention in San Francisco, was Dashiell Hammett. Hughes chose The Glass Key, Connolly Red Harvest, and Hughes, never a man to be shackled by understatement, called Hammett "the Bach, the Louis Armstrong" of crime fiction. "Everything started with him." I'd say Hughes was right.

2) Where Hammett goes, Raymond Chandler follows. Connolly and Hughes chose The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, if my memory serves me well. "I believe I can tell the level of [Chandler's] drinking by chapter," Hughes said. Added Connolly: "I think Chandler is a great writer and a terrible novelst." Connolly's beef? Chandler's plotting.

3) Up third, Ross Macdonald. For Hughes, "his achievement is unsurpassed." In Macdonald's Lew Archer, Connolly said, "we have the first great Christ figure in the genre."

4) Patricia Highsmith, in whom Connolly "senses a genuinely unpleasant person" and whose novel Deep Water Hughes called "a perverse comedy of manners."

They also cited Ed McBain, "the father of the police procedural"; The Friends of Eddie Coyle; and James Lee Burke ("He had not read much crime fiction," Connolly said. "He comes out of a very different tradition.").

Hughes favorite Margaret Millar made the list, as did Red Dragon (Connolly had much of interest to say about the Hannibal Lecter books) and the surprise of the lot, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Hughes said Christie could say in a few sentences what P.D. James would take three pages to say.

More to come.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Words of Bouchercon: "I have no ****ing clue"

"I love you to death, but I have no fucking clue what you're talking about."

— Panelist's reply to his moderator's doctoral thesis of an introduction

Coming soon:

• I muster the detachment to talk about my own two excellent panels.

• I muster sufficient praise for Declan Hughes and John Connolly's lunchtime discussion of "The Ten Crime Novels You Must Read Before You Die."

• I summarize bar schmoozing with Jassy Mackenzie and Stanley Trollip.

• I talk about women, guns, and the dangerous things that happen when they get together.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Declan Hughes in the news

My review of Declan Hughes' fifth Ed Loy novel, City of Lost Girls, appears in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

Here's part of what I had to say about this bracing Dublin/Los Angeles P.I. story:

"In his fifth novel featuring Dublin private investigator Ed Loy, Declan Hughes:

• "Sets major parts of the story in Los Angeles, complete with breathtaking and melancholy scenery.

• "Gets inside a serial killer's head.

• "Sends great torrents of yearningly romantic prose tumbling onto the page.

• "Offers up any number of wisecracks and world-weary observations.

"Crime writers have done all that for years, so how does Hughes keep it fresh?

"By the sheer exuberance of his prose, including some gleeful stomping on Bono's reputation.

"By the angry topicality of his observations ... And mostly by the high respect he has for mystery."

Read my Inquirer review of Hughes' The Price of Blood and a whole lot about Hughes, including the fourth Loy novel, All the Dead Voices, right here at Detectives Beyond Borders.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Has Declan Hughes written the greatest P.I. novel ever?

City of Lost Girls does not so much surpass the classics of hard-boiled P.I. fiction as it invokes them and brings their spirit back to thrilling life.

In Declan Hughes' fifth novel featuring Dublin private investigator Ed Loy, Hughes:

• Sets major parts of the story in Los Angeles, complete with breathtaking and melancholy scenery.

• Gets inside the head of a serial killer.

• Sends great torrents of yearningly romantic prose tumbling onto the page.

• Offers up any number of wisecracks and world-weary observations.

Crime writers have done all that for years, so how does Hughes keep it fresh? By the sheer exuberance of his prose, including some gleeful stomping on Bono's reputation. By the angry topicality of his observations ("...you're the only one who gave a damn about them, Ed. Nobody else noticed they were lost. Although no doubt once the TV gets going on the Three-in-One Killer, all manner of traumatized parents and siblings will emerge, weeping and wailing for the cameras like a bunch of bought-and-paid-for whores.") And mostly by the high respect he has for mystery.

Hughes pays subtle, effective tribute to the old-time mystery tradition of lining up suspects one by one, but it's mystery of a deeper kind that underlies the story:

"You can't extrapolate from someone's childhood and background that he would step over the edge and act in this particular way," Loy tells us. "That's what I find so problematic about criminal profiling: it's magical thinking, when you boil it down, a kind of elaborate system of guesswork and hunch-playing. Nothing wrong with that, I operate pretty much the same way. Every detective does. ... We just don't dress it up the way the criminal profile boys do, calling it behavioral science and making claims for its near infallibility."

That's a nicely contemporary expression of the traditional hard-boiled P.I. world view. More to the point, it's just one example of the book's touching philosophical humility. Nothing human is ever certain or definite in Ed Loy's world or the killer's.

The tentative reconciliations at novel's end are all the more affecting for that fragility. And that is one hell of an update of the hard-boiled P.I.'s romantic side.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Declan Hughes you can use: All the Dead Voices

Declan Hughes has offered ringing defense of the P.I. novel's continuing relevance, so it's fair to ask how he keeps his own version of the genre fresh.

All the Dead Voices, Hughes' fourth novel featuring Dublin investigator Ed Loy, is peppered with pointed, clever, plot-relevant contemporary references. My favorite is this thoroughly contemporary wisecrack: "The text message is a mode of communication ideally suited to lies. Donna adored it."

Other references and asides mordantly assess Ireland's post-Celtic Tiger economic bust and its tendency, like the boom that had gone before, to benefit bankers.

As a journalist, I like Hughes' jab at the "spontaneous" shrines that get left at sites of unfortunate deaths and to which newspapers and television unaccountably devote valuable picture space and screen time: Bits of police tape "and a few drenched bunches of polythene-wrapped convenience-store flowers propped against a wall were all that remained of the crime scene."

Above all Hughes confronts the P.I. story's hoary conventions and embraces them with even more zest than did his hard-boiled predecessors. Take the set piece about the client, almost always a woman, who surprises the P.I. in his office.

We experienced readers know just as well as the P.I. does that the dame is trouble, but a few laconic words of foreboding and resignation from the narrator/protagonist usually suffice to convey this. Not for Hughes. Here's how Ed Loy's two-chapter meeting with Anne Fogarty ends:

"I could hear the sound of the blood in my ears, breathe her scent deep inside me. Stupid, I told myself, stupid, stupid, but I didn't believe me, or I did, but I just didn't care. Worse still, I allowed myself hope."

Does a Philip Marlowe have an undertone of romanticism? Ed Loy has an entire orchestra, and Declan Hughes has the writing chops to pull it off.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Brian McGilloway's Northern Irish Western

Many in Ireland's talented wave of crime writers are forthright about their debt to American (and Canadian) forerunners. Ken Bruen has said: "All my influences are American. That's how to I learned to read. That's how I learned to write." Declan Hughes swears allegiance to Margaret Millar and Raymond Chandler. Declan Burke's Eightball Boogie is a faithful but thoroughly contemporary Chandler homage. And Adrian McKinty explores not one but several of America's seamy underbellies.

I don't know if Brian McGilloway likes Westerns, but the tumbleweeds practically whistle through the opening pages of his second novel, Gallows Lane. A mysterious figure from the past returns to town. A lawman is sent to suggest that he turn right around and head back out. And how about that title:

"(T)he lane along which the condenmed were led — Gallows Lane — still exists. The local kids believe it is haunted. They still claim, in an age when such beliefs are largely forgotten, that on a Halloween night the chains of the condemned can he heard rattling and, if you listen closely enough, you can hear the wails of the accused and the creaking of the long-dead branches."

That's not the only place McGilloway invokes death and myth. But then, the man has an eye for evocative locations, redolent of mystery and myth, even in the midst of a contemporary police procedural. His first novel, Borderlands, opens with a body dumped right on the border between two lands so recently divided. One can't get much more suggestive than that.

===============

And now, while I go on reading Gallows Lane, you can read my quasi-interview with Brian McGilloway here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest Day I: It's in the bag

The formal CrimeFest proceedings got off to a smashing start, with a panel on psychological thrillers moderated by Margaret Murphy and also including Jenni Mills, Steve Mosby, Sheila Quigley and Claire Seeber. One highlight might be useful to would-be authors: Each writer talked of an experience, small or large, that germinated into a book. In one case, it was repeated visits to a young relative in a mental hospital. In another, it was panic induced when confined in a narrow passage in a cave. Lesson: Use your imagination, and see where it takes you.

My question to Mosby about serial killers who act in the name of civilized virtues won me a bag of books for the cleverest question.

A panel on historical mysteries offered a practical answer to a question I'd only been able to formulate in theoretical terms: How does one remain faithful to one's historical setting while writing for an audience of one's own time? The panelists were Roger Hudson, who sets his work in fifth-century B.C. Athens; Ruth Downie and Jane Finnis, each of whom sets her work in Roman Britain; and Roz Southey, whose protagonist is an eighteenth-century musician. Moderator was Edward Marston, whose sets work in several historical periods.

Finnis spoke of a character scarred by war, and of the difficulties writing about such a character without the psychological vocabulary that would be anachronistic to the first-century Roman world. The character suffered from what we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome, Finnis noted, but she could of course not use that term. Nor could she offer the insight that this is what happens to people exposed for a long period to war: "It just had to be left to the reader to make that deduction."

My question to Southey won me another bag of books, or would have had not a fellow attendee pointed out that I'd already won one. I was thus deprived of the opportunity to make a magnanimous gesture and voluntarily surrender the second bag.

The panel on "The Lost Weekend: Eric Ambler and Who? — Forgotten Authors" could keep me talking and reading for months, and I'll likely read and post about some of these authors. Superbly moderated by Martin Edwards, the discussion also included Mary Andrea Clarke, Barry Forshaw, Declan Hughes and Sarah Rayne.

The current authors praised their predecessors for streaks of humor and for gorgeous prose style, two elements I love that are rare these days. Hughes said of Margaret Millar that "She's also, sentence-by-sentence, I think, one of the crime writers who can write. ... She's a great plotter without smacking the least of the Golden Age."

My question about why forgotten books are such a popular topic these days sparked a lively discussion among the panelists about nostalgia. Alas, I won no bag.

Next: The pub quiz. As my teammate Ali Karim would say, "Mental!!!"

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NEWS FLASH: Pub-quiz result: A tie for second place. The prize: A bag of books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More awarders recognize crime beyond borders

With a hat tip to Crime Always Pays comes news of the Macavity Award nominations. CAP is excited that his fellow Irish crime author Declan Hughes is up for a best-mystery-novel Macavity. This follows on his short-listing for the best-novel Edgar Award.

I'm pleased that 3½ of the seven best-novel nominees are from beyond U.S. borders: Hughes' The Price of Blood (called The Dying Breed in the U.K.); The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indriðason (Iceland); and The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny (Canada). The half is for Trigger City by Sean Chercover, who has divided his time between Toronto and Chicago and who blended in beautifully with the natives at the recent Noir at the Bar: TO Style in Toronto. This follows a short list for the best-novel Edgar that was 50 percent non-American authors.

Visit Mystery Readers International for a complete list of nominees for the Macavitys, which are to presented at Boucheron 2009 in October.

In other award news, Bob "I'm not Roger" Cornwell of Crimetime sends notice of nominations for the Glass Key prize, the top crime-fiction award in the Nordic countries. Crimetime announces the nominations here in a wrap-up that spins off into a look at other Nordic awards plus all kinds of neat stuff about the several languages involved as well as links to more sites on Nordic crime prizes and organizations. The article deserves an award of its own.

Read (in English) about the Glass Key nominees here, on a blog operated by the Skandinaviska Kriminalsällskapet, which awards the prize.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

In Bruges wins the Edgar Award for best screenplay, and a word about Declan Hughes

Blue Heaven by C.J. Box has just won the Edgar Award for best novel, but I felt a certain attachment to one of the other short-listed books: The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes (titled The Dying Breed in the UK). The man is Irish, for one thing, right up Detectives Beyond Borders' alley.

Also, I wrote nice things about the book in the Philadelphia Inquirer, beginning my review thus: "A fist to the jaw carries with it an intimacy that a bullet to the gut just can't match." And Hughes' niece's husband played on my softball team. And someone snapped a photo of Hughes and me at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore.

(From left, J. Kingston Pierce, your humble blogkeeper, Declan Hughes. Photo by Ali Karim, courtesy of The Rap Sheet)

Hughes was not the only writer from beyond these shores up for the Mystery Writers of America's top award Thursday night. Also in the running were Karin Alvtegen for Missing and Morag Joss for The Night Following.

Christa Faust's Money Shot was up for best paperback original. She's American, but she wrote a book very much worth reading, and she was responsible for my favorite crime-fiction-related phrase of the year. Click this link to see and hear me using the phrase. (The Edgar for best paperback original went to China Lake by Meg Gardiner.)

Martin McDonagh won the Edgar for best screenplay for In Bruges, a beyond-borders nomination that I forgot to mention earlier.

Congratulations to the winners, and a hat tip to Sarah Weinman for providing up-to-the-minute news as the official Edgars chronicler. (See a list of all Edgar nominees here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Noir at the Bar: Canadians and coincidences

Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore included a panel on the private-eye novel at which Declan Hughes offered a ringing defense of the genre. Hughes' passionate theatrics are always a joy to behold, and they did at least as much as the hospitality-suite coffee to jar conventioneers out of their early-morning stupor.

I remember thinking at the time that defense implies attack. So when John McFetridge invited me to quiz Sean Chercover (left) and Howard Shrier (right) at Toronto's first Noir at the Bar, I thought about how these two writers both honor the venerable P.I. genre and keep it fresh.

They do it in some similar ways both small — Chercover's Ray Dudgeon and Shrier's Jonah Geller use computers and databases in their work — and large: both kill where their predecessors may only have felt like killing. Both also shed tears, which earlier tough P.I.s did not do.

The books share other features, too: Location (Both of Chercover's books and significant parts of Shrier's second are set in Chicago). And I don't remember Percocet previously figuring in the work of two consecutive authors on my crime-fiction reading list.

So John chose two well-matched authors. And if my reports on this Noir at the Bar are more disjointed than usual, I realize now that it's hard to take notes when one is asking the questions.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Declan Hughes in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of Declan Hughes' third novel about Dublin P.I. Ed Loy, The Price of Blood (The Dying Breed in the U.K.), appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer:

"A fist to the jaw carries with it an intimacy that a bullet to the gut just can't match."

That's how the review begins. Read the rest on the Inquirer's Web site, or pick up the paper at a newsstand near you.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Irish crime fiction

Another fine opening from Declan Hughes

Declan Hughes began the main body of his first novel, The Wrong Kind of Blood, with one of my favorite opening lines: "The night of my mother's funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tongue in my mouth and asked me to find her husband."

His third, The Price of Blood (The Dying Breed in the U.K.) does not get to the heart of things quite so quickly. One has to wait until the end of the paragraph for the comic payoff:

"Two weeks before Christmas, Father Vincent Tyrell asked Tommy Owens to fill in for George Costello, who has been the sacristan at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Bayview for thirty years until he was rushed to the hospital with inoperable stomach cancer. A lot of Father Tyrrell's parishioners were outraged, to put it mildly, since Tommy was known as a dopehead and a malingerer and a small-time drug dealer, one of the die-hard crew who still drank in Hennessy's bar, and not a retired Holy Joe shuffling about the church in desert boots and an acrylic zip-up cardigan like George Costello, God have mercy on him. And fair enough, the first time I saw Tommy on the altar in cassock and surplice, it was a bit like something out of a Buñuel film."

That's not a bad way to begin a story, I'd say. In fact, it's a little story in itself, complete with buildup and payoff. So far, I can report that the story also involves tangled family secrets, that blood in several senses figures prominently in Hughes' books, and that this book contains at least one dubious priest. Did I mention that Hughes is Irish?

The novel also explores the world of Irish horse racing in some detail. Between Hughes and Peter Temple in his Jack Irish novels, crime writers are proving that there is territory left to be explored in that old sport.

More to come.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Down these green streets a man must walk, plus a question for readers

It’s not my turn to host the Carnival of the Criminal Minds yet. No, the current place to go for a roundup of the best in crime-fiction bloggery is Material Witness.

Still, I’d like to direct you to Bert Wright’s essay about Irish crime fiction on the always straightforward and somber Crime Always Pays blog. I’ll cull a few highlights from the piece as an entrée, then let you click your way to the main course:

“Thirty to forty years ago, crime in Ireland might involve an ageing farmer murdered over an inheritance dispute, sweet nothings in the ballroom of romance turning to violence in a country lane. Now we have teenage drug barons plugged in cold blood on quiet suburban streets, headless torsos fished out of canals, contract killings as an extension of the services sector, and most notoriously, a fearless crime reporter executed in her car at a busy intersection.”

“As Ken Bruen, one of our most highly-rated crime writers wrote:`I didn’t want to write about Ireland until we got mean streets. We sure got ’em now.’”

“`It’s part of the tradition too,’ declares Declan Hughes. `The hardboiled novel always depended on boomtowns where money was to be made and corners to be cut: twenties San Francisco for Hammett, forties LA for Chandler.’”

With Declan Hughes’ statement in mind, readers, what other boom towns have produced classic crime fiction?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Ken Bruen
Declan Hughes

Can authors and protagonists go home again?

I've recently read two novels in which author or protagonist has returned home after decades abroad: The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes and American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea.

In each case, the return is important to what the novel tries to do. In Hughes', protagonist Ed Loy's time away from Ireland lets him take a sharper view of the changes that wealth, and the crime, drugs and corruption that follow, have brought to the country. (Hughes discusses this and other issues in an interview with Kevin Burton Smith in January Magazine.)

In American Visa, protagonist Mario Alvarez travels from his small town to La Paz, "a city I struggled to recognize; half a million hungry peasants had changed its face." This, I wrote in an earlier comment, may reflect Recacoechea's own impressions after he returned to Bolivia from two decades working in Europe.

The motif of returning home, of coping with changes, is obviously rich in opportunity for drama. Give me some of your favorite examples in crime fiction, or perhaps in other art forms as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Juan de Recacoechea
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Bolivian crime fiction

A sprawling multigenerational story of love, loss, violence, self-discovery and redemption!!! (The Wrong Kind of Blood)

All through my reading of Declan Hughes' violent, funny debut novel, The Wrong Kind of Blood, a television mini-series kept breaking out, complete with family secrets, portentous symbols and dramatic revelations. Thing is, the storytelling is good enough that the weightiness rarely gets in the way, and when it does, Hughes has a knack like none other I've ever seen of blowing away the heaviness with a laugh-out-loud funny line. Here's an example I especially liked:

He told me that when his father was dying, he summoned George to his hospital bed in private and made him swear that if ever Barbara Dawson needed anything, George was to supply it, no questions asked. ... He didn't know whether she was his father's half sister. He didn't have an opinion one way or the other. Family was a pain in the bollocks.

In the same vein, a scene of two killers confessing their crime spices its Hammett-style end-of-the-novel revelation with this: "You threw up," XXXXXX said, not unaffectionately, to YYYYYY." The exchange recapitulates a killing Hughes had shown us earlier, in all its agony, violence, stink and fear. That the two scenes, so different in tone, are about the same event is the best touch in the novel, distilling in a few pages the ugliness, death, rivalry, nostalgia and humor that pervade the book. (Names removed to avoid plot spoilers.)

I posted earlier about the skeptical eyes Hughes casts on Ireland's newfound wealth. Hughes' protagonist, Ed Loy, is situated ideally to make such observations, having just returned from Ireland after many years in California. And he's returned for his mother's funeral, which plunges him right back into the old neighborhood, with its ghosts, disappointments and wounds never healed — and into the arms of the sexy Dubliner who asks Loy to find her husband. And that leads him into a world of drugs, family rivalries, crooked land deals and political corruption.

Families, of course, are the source for some of our oldest drama, and Hughes works that venerable territory on several levels. Three sets of parent-child rivalries from the novel leap immediately to mind, and other familial tensions are all over the place. Loy has lost his wife and his daughter — and his return to Ireland leads him to a search for his long-missing father. A small-time thug finds hope and help at the hands of his strong, determined girlfriend. And the rivalry between a new-breed gangster and his old-line, violent, thug of a brother threatens to explode.

But it never does, and in the end, while the novel's several minor and supporting characters receive the safety and salvation they deserve, justice is decidedly partial for the villains. And that, in the end, lends the novel a nice noir edge without, however, cheap and easy cynicism.

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Read this January Magazine interview with Declan Hughes for Hughes' thoughts about his second book, his upbringing, his appreciation for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and more. Hat tip to Crime Always Pays.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Declan Hughes
Irish crime fiction

Declan Hughes' technique

I posted recently about the slam-bang opening to Declan Hughes' novel The Wrong Kind of Blood. My reading and blogging have been a bit disjointed in recent days, but I've read enough of the Hughes to realize that the man has technique beyond that opening.

One can read the technique as the product of Hughes' efforts to liven up what in less skilled hands might seem shopworn. His protagonist, Ed Loy, is (a) a private investigator who has lost (b) his wife, (c) his job, (d) his child, and (e) his apartment. But we don't find all this out until page 46, during Loy's confrontation with an officious yacht-club steward. The confrontation stirs Loy from a lengthy funk and gets him excited about working again, which is occasion for him to recall the events that put him in the funk, enumerated in the handy list earlier in this paragraph.

Another writer may have given us all this biographical back story at the outset. Hughes gets us into the action and leaves himself the challenge of when and how to present the information later. His solution is not a bad one, and Loy begins to look like an honorable addition to the roster of troubled fictional private investigators, a group about which I've written here and here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Declan Hughes
Irish crime fiction